0:00 - Prelude
1:45 - Fugue

My piano teacher liked to refer to this as the "Gran Turismo" piece as is allegedly plays somewhere in the game. At the time, I was still working on my previous piece, the 5th Prelude & Fugue, but I got curious and looked up this "Gran Turismo" Bach piece. I must have fallen onto this exact one because it sounded very familiar once I started working on it myself.

In contrast to the 5th Prelude, I found this one to be much more manageable, and I overall had a much easier time getting a hold of it. There are 2 spots that always felt very awkward to me though. Somewhere from 0:25 until 0:42, where the hands get quite close together, just did not want to sit right with me and I feel like I rarely played it very clean. I also never really figured out where to take that section in terms of interpretation.

The other tricky spot was 1:00 onward; to be fair, I did not practice it nearly as much as I should have, but that section just felt impossible to nail. As I was practicing it with the metronome, I could manage just fine, but once I tried to integrate it, things always fell apart. The section feels so radically different from everything that preceded, which must be what throws me off every time. And it is quite sad, because this in turn leads me to play the ending at 1:14 not as well as I could be. Overall the main idea I tried to get across is still there, but the execution lacks in this recording. (Actually, none of my three recordings today felt particularly fulfilling)

The Fugue however was quite a bliss once again. I always felt like I preferred Fugue 5 over Fugue 2, which caused me to have some sort of grudge for a very long time. Once my teacher had me delve more into the dynamics and the voicing, things felt very different all of a sudden. Voicing refers to the idea that you want to properly balance each voice such that they don't interfere with each other. If all voices were played at equal "volume" then the overall Fugue just sounds like a lifeless mess. But once you start putting one of the voices to the foreground and all the other to the background, it all becomes almost magical.

To further underline this, we also put a lot of focus on the dynamics. It is very easy to play too loud, but the soft and quiet sound that comes from a "piano" dynamic gives it a "veil of mystery" as my teacher liked to put it. Playing in that dynamic range pulls you in as you wondering where things are going. Loud sections can then be played as mezzo forte instead of forte, and when you really need to go all out you still have plenty of room for that. Striking the keys too hard can quickly make for a harsh and unpleasant sound on the piano.

Regarding the recording itself, I must have gotten tired of the piece somewhere along the way (ever since I started working on it around January). This made me not practice it as much as I should have or would have liked to, which in turn leads to a somewhat lackluster performance. The ideas are mostly present, but it overall lacks in execution. It did frustrate me a little but at the same time I knew exactly that the lack of practice was the root cause for it.

That being said, to follow my train of thought from my previous piano lesson piece upload (Preludium & Fugua V); the classical pieces are not really the main thing on my channel anyways, and they usually do not get a lot of views (actually, most of my videos these days don't get a lot of views ...) so I still decide to upload it, mostly as a matter of tracking my progress. You may consider them a sort of "behind the scenes" of VinLudens :P

Fun fact: I tend to breathe quite heavily when playing the piano, and in this recording (you don't hear it in the video) it was among the worst yet. I had such furious breathing that I made me laugh when I listened back to the recordings.

As always, thank you for stopping by,
Until next time~

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